Russian forces supporting Mali’s military junta have begun using kamikaze-style first-person-view (FPV) drones to attack rebel positions in the north of the country, mirroring the tactics Tuareg rebels and terrorists have used relentlessly to drive military forces from their bases in the region.
The introduction of FPV attack drones comes after Africa Corps and the Malian military have suffered multiple defeats at the hands of the Tuareg-based Azawad Liberation Front (FLA) and its rival-turned-ally Jama’at Nusrat al-Islam wal-Muslimin (JNIM) across Mali’s northern provinces.
The most significant of those defeats — the loss in April of Kidal after more than two years under government control — followed drone-based attacks on government positions in Anéfis and Aguelhok that ultimately forced the military and Africa Corps to abandon their posts.
Small, cheap, off-the-shelf FPV drones have become a staple of insurgent groups in the Sahel and elsewhere. The drones link wirelessly to a headset that allows the operator to see what the drone sees, making it possible to choose and strike targets quickly and with precision.
Pairing FPV drones with easily acquired explosives creates a “devastatingly effective” low-cost weapon, analyst Shahryar Pasandideh has written in his Substack publication, Universal Dynamics.
FLA fighters have become particularly adept at deploying FPV drones against Russian and Malian forces. They used drones to harass retreating Russian forces after reclaiming Kidal in April and even took down a government helicopter with a drone in 2025.
Last year, the FLA began using drones connected to their operator by kilometers-long fiber optics, a technology first introduced in Ukraine that makes the drones immune to jamming technology. FPV drones have another advantage over larger, more expensive military drones: They can generate videos for social media, a powerful propaganda tool. Insurgents use those videos to discredit government and Russian forces and to recruit members to their cause.
Russia has used other drone technology, notably its Garpiya-A1 drones, to attack FLA and JNIM positions over the past year. The decision to adopt FPV drones may indicate the mercenary group sees a need to step up its activity in order to remain in the junta’s good graces, according to analysts.
Since arriving in Mali in 2021, Russian forces, first with the Wagner Group private military company, then with the government-controlled Africa Corps, have engaged in often brutal attacks against insurgent groups and civilians suspected of supporting them. The most notorious of those was the 2023 Moura Massacre, during which Wagner and Malian forces killed more than 300 Fulani men suspected of supporting JNIM over three days in central Mali.
Rather than eliminating FLA, JNIM or the Islamic State-Sahel, the attacks have driven more people to join the insurgents, according to analyst Wassim Nasr with the Soufan Center.
“Wagner’s ethnic operations backfired,” Nasr told ADF. “Scores of Fulanis were killed in center of the country. It only fueled recruitment.”
The junta pays Africa Corps an estimated $10 million a month while the security situation in Mali continues to degrade. Since taking over from Wagner in 2025, Africa Corps has reduced its direct engagement on the battlefield, preferring to operate drones while Malian troops do most of the fighting.
That approach mirrors in many ways the strategy French counterterrorism forces used during their Operation Barkhane, which prompted junta leaders to overthrow Mali’s democratic government, according to analyst Hannah Rae Armstrong. Armstrong recently contributed to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s report on Russia’s involvement in Africa.
“Though Russia’s goals in Mali are more limited than France’s were, Moscow’s struggles to achieve even these objectives may cause other regimes in the region to reassess Russia as a partner over time,” Armstrong wrote. “The insurgency continues to gain ground as Russia — and the military leaders it supports — ignores the underlying drivers while focusing on short-sighted security objectives.”
